Drew and Brittany Brees Have Charming Nyquil Commercial

I just saw the Drew Brees commercial with his wife Brittany for Walgreens and Nyquil. It's posted above. I won't give it away, but it is sweet and cute.

Does Goldilocks Planet Disprove Intelligent Design?

Astronomers, have discovered an Earth-like planet, according to Yahoo! News via the AP. It's called a "Goldilocks" as an allusion to "The Three Bear" story when Goldilocks talks about porridge being not too cold, not to hot but "just right."

My blogging buddy, Deborah White of From My Brown Eyed View, commented on Facebook:

I hope that human kind leaves this planet alone. This one is already stressed to the hilt from misuse. Why should another planet suffer?

Someone else considered that it would be just like us humans to want to start using up all our resources because we think we can go someplace else. I said, "Well, you know how people ran to the suburbs rather than face the problems in the cities they supposedly loved. ..."

Reading more of the article, I don't think we'll be able to raid that planet anytime soon or escape to it. The question is, will humans survive long enough on Earth to even consider inhabiting other planets?

Elsewhere, I considered Stephen Hawking's latest comments about intelligent design, his assertion that god didn't create the universe:

In his latest book, he said the 1992 discovery of a planet orbiting another star other than the Sun helped deconstruct the view of the father of physics Isaac Newton that the universe could not have arisen out of chaos but was created by God.

"That makes the coincidences of our planetary conditions -- the single Sun, the lucky combination of Earth-Sun distance and solar mass, far less remarkable, and far less compelling evidence that the Earth was carefully designed just to please us human beings," he writes.

Do you agree, does the discovery of Earth-like planets mean there's no supreme being behind creation?

You may also read NASA's post about the Goldilocks planet.

Another Louisiana Vampire Tie: Ian Somerhalder

Vampire Diaries star Ian Somerhalder was born and raised across the lake from New Orleans in Covington, La. I forgot to mention him when I wrote about ABC's show The Gates being filmed in Shreveport, La., in the post about True Blood, which is set in Louisiana, and of course, Anne Rice, who started Louisiana's association with vampires.

Last night I was reminded that Somerhalder is from Louisiana when I saw his commercial for the Audubon Institute, produced in May during the BP disaster. In it he laments the oil spill and talks about the work of the institute in saving our coast and wildlife.

On the CW's Vampire Diaries, which I've only seen once or twice, I know Somerhalder plays the bad vampire brother, Ian Salvatore. I saw the scene in which he talked about how Twilight has vampires all wrong but Anne Rice got it right. It made me laugh. Otherwise, I associate the actor more with ABC's Lost.

Burkman, Nigerians, Ethiopians, Call Centers in India and Peggy: Can We Talk About Race Calmly Yet?

I hesitated on even posting the above video or approaching the topic of race, ethnicity, and divisive rhetoric in America because some people tune you out as soon as they read the words "racism" or "racist." Will we have to think up new words to discuss this critical topic in order to avoid national implosion or are there still some adults in America?

In the video posted above conservative columnist S.E. Cupp and former senator Al D'Amato (R-NY), call out GOP strategist Jack Burkman on his use of "racist bullshit" (Cupp and D'Amato's definition) to explain why he thinks the United States Postal Service should be a private corporation. Burkman appeared with the columnist and D'Amato on Money Rocks, a Fox Business News show last week. MSNBC's Keith Olbermann calls Burkman another Tea Party personality and some are calling the blow-up on Money Rocks an example burgeoning enmity between the GOP and the Tea Party, which is leading loyal Republicans to attack some Tea Party folks at their weakest point, the perception that they are a bunch of racist Yahoos.

Is this what it takes for more Republicans to start admitting they know racist language when they hear it, for them to be threatened by another conservative group that people perceive to embrace racist rhetoric? Or are some Republicans simply waking up and realizing that allowing racist propaganda as a political tool to thrive in their party was a mistake? (If so, um, Republican Newt Gingrich didn't get the memo.)

Remember that it's the Republican Party that gave southern, pro-segregation Dixiecrats fleeing the Democratic Party sanctuary back in the day. Mississippi's governor, Haley Barbour, would like us to forget American history, but some of us remember.

In the midst of some Americans attempting to either rewrite history on race matters or escape it, I see a growing number of distraught people who blame racism on those who examine racism in American culture and politics and who analyze racist rhetoric. Consider this comment, which was the first comment in a post at BlogHer that discussed a study discussing the pitfalls of attempting to be racially "color blind."

Gee, this whole race thing is really getting a bit much, I am starting to wonder if "true racists" could be behind all the "race" articles and discussions !!!or maybe it's the politicians -divide and conquer ???? ... Forget race, your friend is a friend, neighbour/co-worker, whatever, who cares what colour they are ????

Another person commenting on the same post even suggested we dismiss scholars who examine race. She said "studies mean nothing."

You'll see similar thinking pop up almost anytime Americans attempt to talk about racism, thinking that reveals a knee-jerk response to the words "race, racism, and racist." Just study the comments section whenever old-school Civil Rights activists such as Rev. Jesse Jackson or Congressman John Lewis call an incident "racist," and you'll see what I mean. You'll can find this type of thinking in discussions of Henry Louis Gates run-in with the Cambridge police officer or in comments on CNN reports about race in America. There are people who believe that those who identify racism are the "racists" and are projecting racism onto others as though "racism" is either not real or unworthy of scrutiny.

I've even read comments around the web where some people attempt to equate calling anyone's behavior "racist" or the person "a racist" to be as bad as calling someone the "n" word. In other words, they treat "racist" as though it is a label to which no definitive behavior can be attached and miss that the word "n*gg*r" is a word to which many negative concepts are attached but the word itself is associated with a racial group regardless of behavior. What happens if we swallow the idea that the words "racist" and "racism" cannot be attached to specific types of behavior, attitudes, perceptions, and policies and therefore cannot be defined?

These attempts to misconstrue and silence any discussion of race and racism and its cousins xenophobia and bigotry have caused me to wonder will we ever be able to have an intelligent discussion about these important social issues again and how they shape societal attitudes as well as political and economic policies in ways that harm America and negate its democratic ideals?

I am running into this wall on examining race as I work on an article about how we approach race, racism, xenophobia, and our perceptions of what these words mean and what messages express our underlying beliefs about race or appeal to repressed feelings on the topic, repressed because we live in an age of political correctness and may be on the precipice of abandoning its goals. I am still in the prewriting stage of the article and this post is part of that.

So, I am wondering specifically how do we talk and develop and deliver messages that communicate effectively on topics that touch race in ways that neither appeal to racist beliefs nor ignore "race" as the big elephant in the room? Can it be done? I say I'm running into a wall because I find people hedge what they say or get defensive even if asked "Is thus and so racist?"

I find that people are inclined to not call a message "racist" or a person "racist" if they like the message or person regardless of the message conveyed or the behavior involved. It's as though they think if they laughed at say a Russel Peters joke that relies on stereotypes, for instance, that their laughter or taking pleasure in the joke makes them racist and Peters too. Or that they would rather determine something that their favorite singer said (Yeah, I'm talking about the John Mayer incident) was not racist no matter how racist it was because to acknowledge the racism in the message may mean they love a racist's music. Consequently, it's difficult to get people to honestly examine messages and behaviors that they enjoy in terms of race and racism.

Last week I asked whether Discover Card's new Peggy series of commercials appeals to xenophobia and possibly could be construed as racist in context of a public perception that the commercial alludes to customer service from India. I mean, can you name another country that's building a reputation as the center of overseas customer service? Some people who like commercial were angry that I would even ask the question, "Are the commercials racist or appealing to xenophobia?" Those who like the commercial had difficulty separating their enjoyment of the commercial from the other hidden appeals to audience in the commercial as though to acknowledge seeing the unspoken appeal meant they as pleased viewers were racist or xenophobic.

I concluded early that the ads are clever and The Martin Agency, the company that created Discover's Peggy commercials, did a good job producing a funny ad that could have been a disaster in terms of full-frontal xenophobia or racism. I do not think the creators of the commercial were trying to appeal to xenophobia or racism but that attacking the frustration of poor customer associated with service from non-native English speakers was smart. Customers don't like the kind of service they're receiving not because the CSRs are in India but because dealing with non-Native speakers who seem to have a different cultural attitude about what constitutes good customer service adds another barrier to already frustrating experiences such as getting a refund or holding company's accountable for lost packages or damaged products. That the CSRs are people of color is coincidental; however, this fact makes it necessary for an advertiser to tread carefully when addressing customer dissatisfaction with such service.

Is Discover telling us, however, that they pledge to never use foreign CSRs? If so, what does that mean? And what does it say about us if we assume the bad service is the result of the people being "foreign"?

In that same post, I added a preview of ABC's new show Outsourced and commented that this show will more than likely stir discomfort. It's about an American company's customer service division being outsourced to India and how the white American manager whose been shipped over to India with the jobs adjusts.

Researching my article, I visited Sepia Mutiny. (The website's name is a pun on the Sepoy Mutiny.) I suspected someone at the site had been thinking about the ways in which the show could go wrong, and I was right. I found a post published as early as May in which site members are starting to question the show in terms of stereotypes. The opinions in comments are mixed with some concern that the show may do a disservice to the Indie movie Outsourced upon which the show is based. For a variety a reasons, many of those commenting don't think the show will last.

Now look at the video embedded at the top of this post, if you haven't done so already (h/t to Roger Ebert who wrote and tweeted about it). The panel turns on GOP strategist, Jack Burkman because he uses racist language to frame his opinion that the United States Postal office should be privatized. He says:

Most of these guys working in the post office and should be driving cabs. And I think we should start stop importing labor from Nigeria and Ethiopia. That's about the skill level. They're only in there because of massive union protection.

Burkman succumbs to that full-frontal racism and xenophobia I think the Discover Card ad tries to avoid. He is directly linking incompetence to ethnicity/race. That's a big fat fail. (At Mediate comments indicate surprise that a Fox network panel acknowledged his words were racist.)

The Discover Card commercial avoids this message as direct appeal by giving Peggy a fuzzy foreign accent, one that's hard to identify, and by making the character a white man pretending to be a woman. This aspect of the commercial resonates with customers who feel that foreign, outsourced customer service centers, usually in India, intentionally seek to deceive customers in misrepresenting their true identities. Consider that previews for the show Outsourced have a scene in which an Indian call center worker fakes a southern American accent, even referencing the "grits" that mama used to make him. Is this a real practice of Indian call service workers, faking out Americans about who they are and where they're located? According to a variety of sources, such as this Marie Claire article, Indian call center employees are trained to fake American accents.

If you saw the movie Slumdog Millionaire, then you may surmise that this deception is not reserved for Americans. In the movie, the main character works at a call center servicing Great Britain and his company also trains workers to lie about its location.

The company he works for is called XLS Communications and is an Indian call center. Jamal is a trainee who’s being taught the geography of key places in London, England. The purpose for this is when British customers call and ask the employees who they are and where they’re from, the employees can say they live in Britain and pretend to know what they’re talking about. (Source)

Again, I give these examples from Outsourced and from Slum Dog Millionaire to say that while Peggy's pretense of being female when he is actually male, while funny, have been included in the Discover Card commercials because they resonate with consumer perception that foreign customer service representatives, specifically those in India, pretend to be something/someone other than who we know them to be.

The Discover Card commercial rightfully plays up this deception but does so with a humorous analogy that will not make the average customer sense a potentially racist or xenophobic message. In addition, with Peggy's constant "yes" in ways that don't make sense to an English speaker, it taps into the frustration customers feel when foreign customer service operators keep repeating the same thing. Actually, CSRs even in America are told to repeat verbatim a script, especially when dealing with "difficult" customers. A native English speaker has trouble doing this; however, because a native English speaker is more likely to have enough facility with the English language to grasp the nuance of any case the customer is making and is able to invent an alternate response that means the same thing.

I say "more likely" because I know of exceptions. I have dealt with native English speakers in Customer Service who don't seem to pick up nuances at all. I have also dealt with non-native English speakers who, after being exposed for a while to western culture, pick up nuance quite well.

Speaking of exposure to culture, there are differences in culture that contribute to the stress between foreign customer reps and Americans, different expectations from American customers of how customers should be treated versus other cultural attitudes toward whether money is ever refunded, negotiating prices and concepts of haggling, fiduciary relationship, fairness in representation of product and services, etc. When these cultural differences collide with language barriers and awareness that the CSR is a "foreigner," many American customers will jump to the conclusion that the service representatives are unskilled and "stupid." Doesn't Peggy seem daft in the Discover Card commercials?

Nevertheless, what the Discover Card commercial does and what Jack Burkman does are chasms apart. The Discover Card commercial ultimately ties Peggy's incompetence to the fictitious USA Prime Credit company not caring about its customers. Peggy hangs up on her customers, the ultimate in lack of concern and disrespect, and by using a white face and a man to actually play Peggy, which is the racial/gender default in America, as well as by using a fuzzy rather than specific foreign accent, the Discover Card commercial separates Peggy's incompetence from any specific race and culture. So, while we may suspect the commercial implies service from India, the commercial does not tie incompetence and a lack of customer concern directly to a specific group of people. Consequently, anyone looking at the commercial will not focus on the ethnicity of Peggy but on what it is that Peggy does wrong in serving customers.

While Burkman gets a fail, Discover Card gets a pass. It works hard not to blame bad service on a specific ethnic group. We can quibble about whether the company should have attacked customer service from the angle of foreign representatives another day. In the meantime, let me say that Discover pinpointed a common frustration many American consumers experience, the poor service that too often results of cultural barriers and miscommunication.

Burkman, however, says almost explicitly that people of color, Nigerian and Ethiopians, working in the USPS cannot do the work because they are Nigerian and Ethiopian. He simultaneously implies these groups are only good for one thing, driving cabs, invoking the notion of not only white but also American supremacy as well as stereotypes of cab drivers and Africans. While he tries to clean up his rhetoric later and say he meant that unskilled labor is ruining the post office, we are left to wonder why he thought the best way to make his point was to tie specific nationalities to incompetence at all.

So, can we get to a point of talking about racism and rhetoric without getting into screaming matches ourselves?

View Discover Card's first Peggy commercial here.

Do Discover Card's Peggy Commericals Appeal to our Xenophobia or Are they Just Clever?

I'm not trying to start a mess, y'all. When I first saw Discover Card's commercial series featuring Peggy, I laughed. She works for "USA Prime Credit" and is a bearded, incompetent customer service representative played by a white male who speaks with a thick accent, choppy English, and she only responds "yes." Again, I laughed. Who hasn't dealt with a "Peggy"? And what a way to send the message that those foreign customer service reps seem to be part of some kind of massive deception and are not who they claim to be.

However, when I first saw the ad I also thought that someone at Discover's advertising agency, which according to AdWeek is The Martin Agency, cleverly dodged being called "racist" or "xenophobic" by giving Peggy all the audible traits of a customer service contractor from a foreign country while presenting the visual image as white male.

What do you think? Does Discover Card get a pass on its Peggy series because it's really about poor customer service or is the company appealing to some lower level of our humanity?

UPDATE: When I first posted this, I wanted to add a video preview of NBC's new show Outsourced, which is about customer service being outsourced to India, but I was tired, and so, I went to bed. I expect to hear of some fallout on this show. It may be very funny, but whenever you hit cultural issues and conflict head on, someone may not think it's amusing. This is food for thought in our so-called post-racial world.

Terry McMillan's Back with Getting to Happy. Remember Whitney Houston in Waiting to Exhale?

You can't recall Terry McMillan's best-selling book from the 90s, Waiting to Exhale, without also recalling the movie starring Whitney Houston, Angela Bassett, Loretta Devine and Lela Rochon, directed by Forest Whitaker, and featuring music by Babyface, who wrote the theme song embedded above. Whitney sang it (Shoop Shoop).

Speaking of Whitney, I thought she'd made a comeback, but apparently she's still having some issues and the gossip rags are on her trail. Sad.

As I reported back in April and reminded my readers at the African American Books Examiner today, McMillan's released a sequel to Exhale called Getting to Happy. It's in stores now. When I heard about the release, I wanted to interview McMillan, but I didn't really pursue, which means I didn't track down her contact information. Too much going on in my own life, and life goes on.

See more at the African-American Books Examiner.

Test Post

Forcing my posts over to new page.

Last Night I Had a Nightmare Sort Of

Last night I dreamed I was at a large hotel on a coastline taking a bath and discovered mosquitoes had been breeding in the bath water. They were everywhere. I got out and put a towel around me after spraying myself with Off, and then I walked into the next room where other hotel guests and the manager were preparing for a hurricane and complaining that the hotel's owner, who was not present, would not get them the supplies we needed for the storm.

As I walked to the other side of the room, I heard the manager, who was white, discussing a restaurant in the community that had been used as a hurricane shelter before. Apparently the restaurant owner had refused entry to an elderly black woman that the community loved, putting her life in danger. The hotel manager finished her story saying, "Talk about your civil rights issue!"

For some reason, these people had gone out of their way to buy a window air conditioner to prepare for the storm, which made sense in the dream but does not in reality. When they plugged it in, it wouldn't work, or at least they kept saying it didn't work. I told them it did. I could feel the cool air going above our heads.

As I left that room, panic rolled over me. I recalled how much a window air conditioning unit can run up an electricity bill and it occurred to me that they had plugged the thing into my room. How could I tactfully tell them that we'd have to split the utility bill when it arrived? If I didn't, then I would get stuck with paying for everyone else's energy.

No. I haven't analyzed this dream yet.

Did you know ABC's The Gates is filmed in Louisiana?

Vampires are overrunning Louisiana again. HBO's True Blood takes place in Louisiana with vamp bar Fangtasia located in Shreveport and the vamp queen living in New Orleans. And now I've learned that ABC's vampire show The Gates is filmed in Shreveport. The story's not set in Louisiana, however.

I say "vampire show," but like True Blood, The Gates includes other supernatural beings, such as werewolves and succubi.

Thanks to Anne Rice's vampire series that began with Interview With the Vampire in the 70s, people associate this town and our state with creatures of the night. For instance, Sting was inspired by Rice's vampire books to write the song "Moon Over Bourbon Street," and I suspect the popular association influenced the writers behind Dracula 2000 to set that campy horror movie partly in New Orleans as well.

Charlaine Harris considered Rice and the focus on New Orleans when she decided to set her Sookie Stackhouse in Bon Temps, La., a ficticious little town, a contrast to city glamor and mystique. The True Blood series is based on those books.

I realized The Gates was connected to Louisiana when I caught the end of the show's credits on DVR last night. At first I thought I was seeing things when the logo for Louisiana Entertainment appeared. I rewound and my eyes are fine.

Today I googled it all. The series is shot in the country club community of Southern Trace in Shreveport. Read more at Lousiana Entertainment, an office within the State of Louisiana’s Economic Development department.

Last night's True Blood finale was a doozy with Sookie leaving with the fairies, Tara, after cutting her hair, fleeing Bon Temps in an old Mercedes, and Bill being outed by Eric as a liar. So, things are getting hotter.

The Gates, according to its finale's preview, will close out its first season next Sunday with a supernatural war, vampires versus werewolves and other tropes. Of course, I'll watch it.

Black People, the Color Wars, and Ultimate Whiners

I came across an old song today that reminded me of colorism issues in the black community, and again I remind my fellow African-Americans that other people of color have similar dysfunctions. Ask someone observant from India about it, for instance, and they'll tell you that some of their people favor lighter skin.

Curtis Mayfield (June 3, 1942 – December 26, 1999), opens the set in the embedded video with "We the People Who are Darker than Blue," bemoaning colorism and lack of unity in the black community back in the day. He makes one brief statement, referencing the matter in the same context I recall it, and then moves forward with musical allusions to Africa, the mother of us all.

I recall colorism within a dysfunctional social system snaking through the black community and overall favoring lighter skin, which is why I'm glad Field-Negro occasionally mentions his wife, who grew up in Louisiana, as did I, and recalls the old-school hang-ups. I'm glad because what she has to say corroborates what I have to say (He's commenting on some drama with the singer Fantasia who thinks she was mistreated by the media because she's dark-skinned with "more African" features). Otherwise, to hear some people tell of our past today you'd think no light-skinned person was ever favored. Any favoritism is discounted by their recountings because some of our lighter-skinned members say the hatred they felt from darker-skinned members outweighed any benefit they may have gotten from being born with lighter skin and straighter hair in a society favoring such hair and skin. Furthermore, they think that if a lighter-skinned black person was ever favored, they are no longer favored today. (No comment on the Fantasia drama b/c I don't follow her.)

I hate it when people try to rewrite history and current events so they can feel good about themselves and their mommies and dadies (Yes, I see you Haley Barbour), which is why I'm also glad I have friends who will tell the truth who grew up with light skin and curly or straight hair and will admit that their lives had a bit of both rain and sunshine connected to skin color. Sometimes they were hated for their lighter skin color; sometimes they were loved. They don't deny, however, an awareness of bias in their favor in the world, either in their families or in certain social settings.

I agree that colorism affects people of color in ways similar to the way Zora Neale Hurston observes it in her play Color Struck. It's a terrible thing, a double-edged sword jutting from a traveling merry-go-round gone wild. Scars for everyone! What's more terrible is that while that play was written in the early 1900s, we still have people struggling with the scars of colorism today.

Consequently, I come across light-skinned black people between the ages of 45 and 60 who say that during the era of black pride, mainly the late sixties and early 70s, they were put down for having lighter skin, a trait over which they had no personal control, and some of them are still carrying a lot of baggage and anger toward their darker brothers and sisters for that rejection. Some of these wounded souls blame darker black people for everything from their never feeling accepted to never finding true love.

Being neither very light nor very dark, I experienced neither side of this specific tribulation long enough to carry its deep psychological scar, meaning I'm not aware of being ignored, favored or rejected by other black people because of my coloring. I have run, however, into a few people who revealed assumptions about me based on my being a little lighter than they were and speaking in a way they labeled "proper" or "white," but these encounters were so brief that I brushed them off or they happened late enough in my life that I was equipped to calmly analyze the dysfunction rather than internalize the insult.

So, I just have regular black folks stuff--issues with white supremacist propaganda and practices in general, issues with being fat in a thin-loving society, and since I'm female, some gender-discrimination baggage, too. I listen to everybody's whining and occasionally I want to slap black, white, brown, and yellow; fat, thin, skinny, and voluptuous; rich, poor, and comfortably oblivious; cat ladies, dog ladies, and gentlemen zookeepers; progressives, intellectual liberals, conservatives, the self-proclaimed tasteful, and all the culturistas.

Generally, I'd like to have a global altar call for humanity, including me, with a conversion line where prior to reaching the altar, God (in my world, God exists) gets to swat us each upside the head until we experience whatever epiphany required to make us treat each other with greater compassion and respect, and afterward, we fall on our knees destined to never forget again our own stupidity. In this vision, we arise, eternally embracing the practical lessons of forgiveness and love, and go forth healed.

But wait! Isn't life supposed to accomplish this end?

NFL Saints Parade, Concert Empties a Few UNO Classes

I nearly broke my neck to get to my 3:00 class at the University of New Orleans yesterday only to find out I was one of less than half of my classmates to attend. One person said the campus parking lots started emptying just after noon as Saints fans headed to the French Quarter to see the parade put on by the NFL and concert with Taylor Swift and the Dave Matthews Band to celebrate the first game of the season.

My dad, 89, nearly hates parades and thought another one before anybody had won anything is crazy, possibly even a jinx to the season. I said that the NFL probably held the parade after seeing the spectacle the city put on to welcome the Saints back from their Super Bowl victory in February. According to this WWL TV video about last night's festivities, I'm correct.

I had two classes last night and am a graduate student. Consequently, I can't afford to skip lectures and discourse in the name of football or our beloved Saints, unless, of course, it's another Super Bowl victory shindig, at which point life comes to a halt.

The class that was mostly absent is majority undergrads, and I hope they had a good time. When I was a young, undergrad student, I would have probably skipped too for that kind of party. The second class of the night was full, however. It's all grad students.

In case you missed the news, the Saints won. They beat the Minnesota Vikings 14-9, and the game was also deemed a ratings victory for NBC.

How Many Hits Will this Poem Get from Sex Surfers?

Sex and the 50-Year-Old Woman
By Nordette N. Adams

With a body like Helen Mirren's--
never burdened by babies stretching
skin to an alien curve--she is much at 50
the same as 30, bold and glistening,
fevered with lust.

With a body like Venus of Willendorf,
stretched after bearing fresh blood,
she forgets her name, contemplates
skin alien as cratered moons cooling,
damp and mysterious--the unexplored cave.

© 2010 Nordette N. Adams

Sarah Palin's Irresponsible Use of Language

From the Christian Science Monitor:

AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka charged that if Republican political star Sarah Palin is not more careful in her choice of words, the political movement she has helped to create will be linked with 1950s McCarthyism

I listened to what Trumka had to say and I kept thinking of Anil Dash's commentary about how Palin uses language that he wrote during the 2008 presidential campaign (See "What is Sarah Palin Saying?").

I also wrote about Palin's distortions of fact and how she used language back then. I wrote about it more than once.

And let's not forget conservative attempts to change the meaning of the word "feminist" and misrepresenting the beliefs of Susan B. Anthony. (See "Dear Sarah Palin: Did you know Susan B. Anthony liked to pal around with socialists?") I've been wondering why do conservatives want to appropriate the word "feminist" so badly?

BP Holds Oil Spill Payments Hostage, Claims Oil Restrictions Hurt

As reported through a Foreign Policy Magazine news brief:

BP officials hinted that the company may not make voluntary payments, which it had previously consented to in the wake of the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, if Congress goes forward with plans to restrict the company's activities in the Gulf of Mexico.

BP is saying "if lawmakers pass legislation that bars the company from getting new offshore drilling permits," Gulf coast restoration is in jeopardy. Kind of gives new meaning to using the words "snake" and "oil" together. Think snakey oil salesman instead of snake oil salesman.

Read more at the New York Times.